Tuesday, 31 May 2016

When I was young my homosexuality
consisted of searching for descriptions
of places that linked the bent of my nature
to where I felt at ease, accepted as bent.
Fantasy always meant imagined aggression,
and the asexual transactions of 'the real world'
suggested something more closed than they said.

Homosexuality was tied in with masculinity,
and how both worked was opaque and hidden.
But any male worthy of their status was Alpha
and their manhood was about triggering conflicts
in others that only the male triggering them could win.
I felt invisible, particularly when men covertly fought
over all that was not them-the better to subdue it to their will.

Saturday, 28 May 2016

Who among us can both play the lead
and direct the movie that is their lives?
And do both well at the same time?
The older I get the more I find
that we are often better being mere extras
in each others lives than it is easy to admit.

Friday, 27 May 2016

Dystopias are many and varied,
but consistent;comfort is for the few
at the top who control everything,
particularly how they are understood.
Discomfort is the norm for all
beneath them who are controlled.

In societies built on secrecy around control
the censorship works like the first rule
in the film 'Fight Club'; 'Nobody talks about... '

Thursday, 26 May 2016

The difference between bullying and banter
in human behaviour is often hard to find.
But if confidence is to ever be found
it is through seeking the good humour
in the faces of those they pay attention to,
as those folk talk, rather than being afraid to listen.

Wednesday, 25 May 2016

In the western world we all know
how our pasts get washed away
by waves of peaceful technology,
so that how we was once amusing
and low tech, if not merely mechanical,
very quickly becomes false nostalgia
for future generations to feast upon.

Whilst millions across the world
lose much less and mourn a lot more
for being made to leave their country
of origin because the military hardware
which the rich supplies to strengthen weak
cleptocracies dictates their departure.

Sunday, 22 May 2016

The media cliche about 'the family breakfast'
used to be the scene where middle class fathers
would 'head' the table by insisting 'his' family
be silent whilst he read his broadsheet newspaper.

These papers were as big as they were self important.
Whilst he held his up he could not seen,
which was offered as proof that he was reading.
Nobody knew what he was looking at,
but his hands conducted the silence of the children
whilst they hold the paper by it's edges.

Now we isolate ourselves with screens
of different sizes, from mobile phones to lap tops,
I-pads and the rest, all of which absorb more
of our attention than we choose to realize,
to diminishing effect. They are the new broadsheets.
We have to sit still to be attentive of them
and through them we screen out everybody
and everything, whilst they keep our fingers busy.

I often hear the word 'hypocrite'
used by one person to describe another
from folks who imply they are consistent.
What this much abused epithet
never renders to me is whether the subject
of the insult was two faced by design or accident.

But if we are driven enough to be unobservant
then accident and intent willbecome our two faces....

Monday, 16 May 2016

It is not that 'time slips through our fingers'
when we try to measure the process of longevity,
but more that time is real and our fingers
are part of it, more than we can feel or know.
Some of us felt time more, and felt it to be more gentle,
before wrist watches became the sign to us
to join the queue to become the fraught adults
that we hoped we never would become.

Sunday, 15 May 2016

Orwell was well off the mark when in 1948
he created the idea of 'Newspeak',
as a key part of the apparatus of the state
to reduce the breadth of the language of the masses.

Though it would be natural to all governments
to manipulate any language which might describe
their covertly conducted mass surveillance,
in reality total control of language is impossible.

Youths the world over have always created slang
to find each other and detach themselves
from the adults who they feel control them.
Though equally said youths are still controlled,
but more by the supply of goods and images
through which they think they mark their territory
the places where they become the dictators of small worlds.

Friday, 13 May 2016

they will lay claim to us
-that is their reason for being
which we too take part in,
in ill health and great wealth.
It is up to the individual
to make others more individual
to make a life less forced by family ties.

Thursday, 12 May 2016

A sense of courage is always retrospective.
You only know that you had enough of it
after you have been through the experience,
and later you find a calmer place,
whether that is of learning-or simply recovery.

Very few of us will get as far
through the many life experiences
as intact we would each of us like.

Tuesday, 10 May 2016

Education often refines and improves intelligence
but the education that adults use in networking
through career structures nearly always destroys
much more than it creates. Through sophistication
it narrows it's holder, even as it causes admiration.

Monday, 9 May 2016

The new driver-less car is going to become
the ultimate symbol of that recent idea
that has spread like a virus 'the free market'.
Both are all mechanism and no driver
and both will crash when least predicted to.
When they do then 'Nobody' will be in charge
though many who gained from being passengers
will claim they were taken for a very rough ride.

Monday, 2 May 2016

Hollywood was founded on talented people
making too many romances, cheap thrillers,
horror films and actioners such that even now,
over a century on, many modern films are B movies
in disguise-costly and badly made fantasies.
Fit for nobody more than undiscerning teenagers.

But to sell these films to adults and families
many of them are up-rated through overselling
to stop the glut of sub-standard entertainments
being too clear for too many consumers to see.

Sunday, 1 May 2016

I have not seen the new film 'Son of Saul', by first time Hungarian director Lazlo Nemes, but presently it is much discussed in the media, particularly since it won the 2016 Oscar for 'Best Foreign Language Film'. As a film it naturally brings to mind the sharp crticism made by the German philospher Adorno after WW2 -

'There can be no poetry after Auschwitz'.

But of course there was poetry after Auschwitz, and memoirs by many who suffered but survived the many death camps, until such books became a genre of book in their own right. My favourite of this type of book is one of the early and outstanding examples, Primo Levi's 'If this is a man'/'The Truce', which-trust me in this-is the best antidote to the false positive feelings and power of commerce that surround the season of Christmas that you will ever find.

But the full quote by Adorno should be quoted about the difficulties around any expression of art
that pertains to life, particularly film, which includes the portraying of profound suffering.....

'Perennial suffering
has as much right to expressionas a tortured man has to scream; hence
it may have been wrongto say that after Auschwitz you could no longer
write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural questionwhether after Auschwitz you can go on living--especially whether one who
escaped by accident,one who by rights should have been killed, may go
on living.His mere survival calls for the coldness,the basic principle
of bourgeois subjectivity,without which there could have been no
Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared.By way of
atonement he will be plagued by dreamssuch as that he is no longer
living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole
existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a
man killed twenty years earlier.